The founding conviction
Search For The Next Ltd is incorporated in November 2015 with a single founding conviction: go back to the physics, take a different route, and build what CMOS cannot.
The company's founder, David Summerland, comes from LED manufacture — a world of applied physics, tight margins, and the constant pressure to extract more performance from constrained materials. His instinct, developed over years of building electronics companies, is that the industry's reliance on CMOS is not an inevitability. It is a path dependency.
A different route
CMOS — Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor — became the dominant logic technology because it offered lower power consumption and better integration potential than bipolar transistors. But CMOS carries its own constraints: scaling limits, heat, complexity, and a fabrication infrastructure that requires billion-dollar facilities to sustain.
David's analysis goes further back. Rather than optimising CMOS, he revisits the fundamental physics of the transistor — exploring tunnel mechanics and quantum behaviour — and arrives at a different architecture entirely. This work leads to our device technology in 2021 and our semiconductor platform: devices that remove the restrictions of bipolar without inheriting the constraints of CMOS.
Sam Lodh joins as co-founder
In March 2016, Sam Lodh joins as co-founder, bringing 26 years of corporate law experience and the commercial and legal grounding the company needs to build properly. The company establishes itself at the Nottingham Ingenuity Centre at Nottingham University, with two full-time and one part-time staff member.
The initial target market is power electronics — a high-value sector where efficiency improvements translate directly into commercial advantage. But the underlying technology, it will become clear, has a much broader reach.